After a performance in Boston's Symphony Hall some years ago, an excited dowager swept backstage to the conductor's dressing room. "Maestro!" she cried. "Maestro, you play so magnificently! You you are God!" Serge Koussevitzky turned to his fan and, with a perfect deadpan, replied humbly: "Yes, modom, and soch a responsibility."
Last week Russian-born Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitzky was dead, at 76, of a cerebral hemorrhage. No one could deny that his responsibility, although self-imposed, had been well carried out; he had made a phenomenal contribution to world music in general, to American music...